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Net pull -- P&G will use
plugs in TV news stories
In a move that could further blur the line between news reporting
and advertising, Procter & Gamble is to announce that
it will use plugs in television-news stories to market P&G
brands more effectively over the Internet. Under the deal,
P&G will sponsor 90-second features produced by a San
Diego-based TV production company called Innx on such topics
as health care, parenting and nutrition.
The Innx segments will be distributed free for use by local
television stations nationwide. At the end of each segment,
the reporter, anchor or narrator will tell viewers they can
learn more by going to the TV station’s Web site and
clicking on an icon for a related P&G product. For a feature
on diaper rash, for example, the icon might say Pampers, and
a mouse click would whisk the consumer to a Pampers Web page.P&G,
the first major advertiser to sign up for the spots, will
probably sponsor about one segment a day from March to December.
Innx will seek other sponsors for news stories that don’t
relate to the brands P&G has signed up for.
P&G plans to sponsor segments that dovetail with such
brands as Crest dental products, the fiber-laxative Metamucil
and the cold medicines NyQuil and DayQuil.
The Web site experience will be designed to seem more like
an informational brochure than a marketing pitch. The site
might, for example, feature questionnaires to help assess
a viewer’s risk of contracting a particular malady. Innx
and P&G insist the consumer-products company won’t
have a say in the editorial content of the programming. But
P&G will be able to pick which features it wants to sponsor.
The consumer-products company has asked not to be associated
with stories that could hurt consumers’ image of its
products.
For instance, it has requested that Crest plugs come at the
end of stories about oral care and dentistry but not about
oral cancer. The whole idea troubles Bob Horner, president
of NBC News Channel, an internal NBC service that distributes
content to the roughly 200 NBC affiliates that carry newscasts.
News Channel has offered Innxprogramming for about a year
and a half, and NBC affiliates have used it regularly.
But Horner says that while he hasn’t seen the new advertiser-sponsored
segments, if there’s a close link between the content
and the plug, he may not distribute them.
He says he would be concerned both about actual advertiser
influence and viewer suspicion of advertiser influence. “If
there was a piece on diet pills, we wouldn’t want that
to be sponsored by a company that makes diet pills,”
he says. “We don’t want the reality of a problem
or the appearance of a problem.”
Horner adds that he probably would distribute segments whose
plugs are unrelated to their content - say a Merrill Lynch
plug at the end of a story about gum disease. But he says
that local affiliates may not want to air any news story with
a plug embedded in it.
Keith Connors, executive news director of WCNC in Charlotte,
N.C., an NBC affiliate that is owned by Belo Corp, says he
is also concerned. WCNC airs Innx stories that refer to Innx’s
own HealthSurfing site every weekday, but “if and when
this product is introduced to us, we’re going to have
to take a long hard look at it,” he says. “We certainly
don’t want people to think we’re only providing
them with this information because we’re trying to sell
them a product. That’s not journalism. That’s advertising.”
Jak Severson, Innx’s chief executive, says he’s
confident Innx can resolve such worries. “TV stations
are always jumpy about third-party content,” he says.
“We’re sensitive that we have to demonstrate a level
of ethical purity that far surpasses the networks’ own
and certainly that of the local stations.”
And not everyone is critical. Michael Kubin, co-chief executive
of Leading Web Advertisers, a closely held New York company
that tracks Internet advertising, says combining the Internet
with other media is “exactly the way the Internet should
be used.”
Marissa Gluck, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet
research firm, notes that “when an announcer says, ‘Please
go to our site,’ it’s much more effective than just
having a 30-second spot in the commercial break.” But
she cautions that “the value is really whether the consumers
go to the Web site. And even if they do go to the site, it’s
questionable what the real value is” in terms of actual
product sales.
Innx has produced nearly 500 segments for about 200 TV stations
since the company was founded in April 1999. It currently
refers TV viewers to an Innx-created Web site called HealthSurfing.com,
which it uses to measure viewer-response rates. It has found
that nearly 0.5 per cent of viewers go to the site. Innx expects
big-name brands like P&G’s to generate even more
clicks. In Vancouver in fall 2000,Severson says, Innx asked
the members of a focus group how they would react to a product
plug instead of a HealthSurfing mention. They said they wouldn’t
mind at all, he says. “What we came away with was that
the audience perceived no influence over the content by the
advertiser.”
The move is an experiment for P&G, which essentially invented
soap operas to hawk its wares. Like most major US marketers,
the company is under pressure to find a more effective way
to use the Internet to create brand awareness and increase
sales.
P&G is betting that news reports will get better results
than banner ads, whose click-through rates overall hover at
around 0.25 per cent.
P&G and Innx both declined to disclose financial terms
but said P&G’s investment is small in dollar terms.
Severson says the agreement could bring Innx up to “several
million dollars.” P&G will get a hefty discount over
other advertisers, whom Innx plans to charge $11.50 per thousand
homes reached by local TV stations.
At about nine million viewers reached by Innx programming
a day, says Innx Chief Executive Jak Severson, the cost will
be roughly the same as the price of a general-replacement
30-second ad on local television news. Eventually, Innx hopes
to get a slice of the increased ad rates that TV stations
may be able to charge if its segments make the station’s
commercial time more valuable.
“We’re still in a learning mode on how the Internet
fits into our overall marketing strategy,” says Bryan
McCleary, a P&G spokesman. “The goal is always to
have more than just advertising on Web sites. It’s got
to really provide useful information that people are going
to want to come back to.”
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